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Comment by joncp | Hacker News Reader

This has already been fixed. With newer planes, the seat's pivot point is above the knees of the person behind.

How does a pivot point fix a reclining seat that is crushing my laptop into/onto the fold down tray?

It doesn't... today you have to buy the premium economy (extra legroom / exit row) seat or business class if you want to do anything on a laptop.. even if it's the small 11-13 inch style.

As of today, I don't have to purchase any upgrades to use my 15" laptop on the foldout tray in 'normal economy class'. Things only get cramped when the seat in front of me reclines.

Also how can this possibly be true for every human being? I'm only 6'5'' and for any plane I've been on this has not been true. Including "newer" planes eg. the 787 Dreamliner.

Never seen this, was on a Qatar 787 recently, and an a320neo, and freshly densified 777, where is this magical seat you speak of?

Not sure what you're asking, did you misread my original comment? This magical seat does not exist, even on new planes.

sorry I meant to reply to HEAD~2

6’5” is something like 4 SDs above the mean for adults (male & female), FWIW.

So what is it worth? What help is this to someone 6'5"? He can hardly change his height to be more in line with the average person.

It might help them to better understand the tradeoffs airlines make when designing their cabins. There are always exit row seats, which not only have longer seat pitch but also have rows ahead which cannot recline. Maybe airlines could waive the modest upgrade fee for passengers of extreme height.

I didn't realize that. I say "only" because my father is 6'10'' and many of my siblings are taller than me. My perspective is skewed.

Using averages to accommodate passengers doesn't work. If you do that, 50% of your customers are going to be very unhappy FWIW

Accommodating everyone except those taller than four standard deviations above mean would (assuming gaussian distribution) mean accommodating 99.997% of your passengers.

This completely misses the point.

First of all, you are only correct if assuming a gaussian distribution of heights (for which I have seen no evidence).

Who cares if it accommodates 3SD, 4SD or 5SD? You would never engineer a system around standard deviations of a distribution of heights.

Instead it's about marginal cost. Ideally you would accommodate 100% of your passengers unless their marginal cost is just too high.

You are also assuming the distribution of passengers is the same as the distribution of the population. Or the distribution of customers willing to pay certain prices is the same as the general population.

Airline seating is very complex as it's not a fixed price, changes constantly, and even varies from seat to seat in a single flight. Prices aren't fixed so just because you increase marginal cost does not mean reduce profit.

Lastly it also ignores completely the fact that even a shorter person would enjoy the increased room.

You responded to a comment about how a case is extremely uncommon, with a suggestion about half the population. All I pointed out is that your argument is less than perfectly applicable to the comment to which you're responding, by stating a mathematical fact.

I didn't assume anything, ignore anything, assert anything, or even draw a conclusion about what should be done. Just spreading facts.

Call me Johnny Factseed.

Again you assumed a Gaussian distribution. There is nothing "factual" about that.

Not to mention I was pointing out that your facts were irrelevant because the miss they point (Using population statistics to guide the design/engineering of an experience is doomed)

I'm not designing the experience. Nor does telling you what a particular distribution would indicate if assumed, imply that I have assumed the distribution.

Mathematically we would expect height to be distributed in a somewhat gaussian fashion due to the central limit theorem. Therein lies its relevance. However, nobody is 70 feet tall (yet!), so it would be fair to argue that the tails are characterized differently by a gaussian distribution than by the "true" distribution for height (which would probably divert some of that probability mass from the far tails to the near tails).

Still, it is quite misplaced to talk about 50% of the passengers when the discussion is about substantial outliers.

Just giving you some information that will help you use more applicable axia in the future.

Signed,

Johnny Factseed

That's not how the CLT works. It does not mean every random variable is Gaussian.

fellow 6'5" flyer here, let's start a lobbying group

One of the few times I feel underrepresented in my life is that moment when I am shoving my knees into the seat in front of me as I slowly wedge my hips into my assigned seat.

I wonder if you could start an airliner targeted at tall people and only have seats that can fit 7 ft tall human beings.

We really do need a lobby.

Which ones? I've never seen one like this.

Or do you actually believe that the knees are on the seat level? My knees are considerably higher, since the seats are too low for me.

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